It was in hiding in the back of a drawer. How did it get there?
Admittedly, my Mom wrote me so many encouraging notes through the years I probably wasn’t thinking when I thoughtlessly placed it in the corner of my desk drawer rather than safeguarding it in a safer place, properly secured as a relic of the past, a treasured moment she mailed me.
Mom’s been gone since March 17, 2019. Dad preceded her with his departure three years before. They had been married 73 years when Dad died. Mom was never the same.
I would visit her whenever possible, but Lubbock, TX, isn’t a quick and easy trip from my home in Kentucky. Now, I wish I had traveled there more. Now, I long for just one more moment.
Most every day, I would call Mom. I used to say, “I’ve enjoyed eating lunch with you, Mom,” for I made a point of calling during that time. Even though we had visited the day before, she would answer the phone like she hadn’t heard from me in years. “David!” she would declare with a lift in her voice. “You called!” She could have talked the rest of the day.
Then, she gradually weakened until long pauses extended to stretches of silence when I would have to repeatedly call her name, rousing her back when she drifted away from our conversation. Towards the end, I felt her weakness as I strained to hear her soft, halting speech.
But the words she wrote in that note, retrieved from the darkness of my desk drawer, were full of light and life.
In the faded ink, I deciphered a date: 2-5-08. (Mom dated everything.)
At 53, I was beyond being a full-grown man. Mom was a week shy of her 87th birthday.
But it could have just as well been one of those notes she mailed to me as a freshman in college in Texas, or later, as a young man in New Jersey, Alabama, Louisiana, or Kentucky.
“Please read every line several times,” she pleaded in the note. “These are my words to you, Love you, Mom.”
Her note was attached to a bookmark with a poem addressed to “Son.” The unnamed author wrote of the special memories with her child, like his scribblings at three years old, pictures of him with two missing teeth, the ball he would leave in the corner of his room, and the muddy shoes she would clean for him each day.
It concludes with the mother’s comfort that her sacrifices of love could not compare with the joy of being his mother: “But your hugs at night made my days worthwhile. Muddy shoes were forgotten with one little smile. At night I’d watch you sleeping in your room and I’d thank God for one more day with you.”
This Mother’s Day, before I lay myself down to sleep and pray the Lord my soul to keep, I (now closing in on the end of my sixth decade) will glance at some of those childhood pictures: one when I was missing a couple of teeth, another of me playing ball. And I’ll look at some of my earliest childhood efforts at writing, though I doubt I will find a worn photograph of my muddy shoes.
And having pondered those childhood moments, I will imagine Mom smiling beside me.
And maybe, remembering how Mom would peek in on her youngest boy at night, I’ll whisper just before drifting off to sleep:
“Yes, Mom, I did what you asked: I read each line several times, knowing they are your words to me,
This Mother’s Day.”
Beautiful article. Meme loved her boys and she made sure you knew it. 🩷